Archive for the 'Stylophones' Category

With the help of a correspondent to my blog I was lucky enough to get hold of an early 80’s ‘Stylophone’ from the Soviet Union.

Entitled the ‘Gamma’, I’m told it was made in the city of Chernivtsi, a part of the Soviet Union now in western Ukraine.

Larger than a Dübreq Stylophone, it came in a neat plastic box measuring about 25x20x5cm.

Inside, the Gamma Stylophone itself has a 20-note keyboard at the front, a stylus – more complicated than a Dübreq Stylophone stylus – on a twin lead, a volume control on the left-hand side, and a speaker in the top left-hand corner. A coloured label indicates the notes of the scale represented by each section of the keyboard.

There are also 3 strange slots above the keyboard, which are slightly wider than the keyboard and just deep enough to be accessed by the stylus. This close up of the keyboard shows the middle of two of these slots:

The stylus, as mentioned above, is more complicated than the Dübreq Stylophone stylus in that it includes a combined press and slide switch. It turned out that the press switch had to be pushed for the stylus to work; the slide switch turned the vibrato on or off.

Helpfully, my correspondent had cleaned the instrument before sending it, so there wasn’t a lot for me to do! I opened the case – just 4 slot-headed screws underneath – and examined the insides. The circuit board was attached to 4 mounts on the base; the speaker had 4 mounts on the front.

Turning the circuit board over, I could see the components and the layout. Everything seemed neat and well made, with a good solid loudspeaker.

The components on the circuit board weren’t quite the same as their Western equivalents, but quite recognisable, nonetheless:

I removed a little more of the disintegrating foam – and replaced a speaker wire, which I had inadvertently detached – and then turned to the power cables. The battery fittings had been removed, but I could see from the booklet which came with the instrument, that these had been designed for a pair of Soviet-style 4.5v batteries: my correspondent explained to me that these were similar to a group of three 1.5v batteries – not unlike the kind of thing we used to have inside cordless phones – but which were, in any case, now uncommon.

I just added a PP3 battery clip, similar to the type one would find in an old-style Dübreq Stylophone, which worked fine. I hadn’t intended to ‘circuit-bend’ this device, but I pondered on adding an on/off switch, as there isn’t one in the original design.

I attached the battery and tried it out. The push switch needed a bit of attention – a few squirts of contact cleaner helped – but all the notes sounded perfectly, and the vibrato turned on and off. I wasn’t able to check that the notes were in tune, and there’s no fine tuning control, which you would find on a Dübreq Stylophone, but I’ll look into that later.

The booklet that came with the Gamma Stylophone was delightful – the paper and printing quality weren’t high, but the illustrations were beautiful and the colourful instructions on how to play the many songs were attractively set out.

There are a number of different instruments called the ‘Melophone’ or ‘Mellophone’. The one on the left in the picture below (by Kc8dis at the English language Wikipedia) is a brass instrument used in marching bands and the one on the right is ‘a cross between a guitar and a harmonium’, according to the Squeezytunes blog (at http://squeezyboy.blogs.com/squeezytunes/2008/02/melophone.html, from which the pictures came).

However, this Melophone which I recently acquired, is clearly a type of Stylophone – and a very stylish type of Stylophone at that!

I had never heard of this Melophone before, and found only a single reference to it on the internet. A glance at the accompanying booklet – which, as you will see below, follows exactly the same style and format as the booklet from a 1960s/70s Stylophone – shows that it was not written by a native English speaker. The company that manufactured it is (according to this website: http://www.pewc.com.tw/eng/) or was (according to this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Mobile) founded in Taiwan in the 1950s and acquired the name ‘Pacific Electric Wire and Cable Company’ on December 30th 1957.

The company would, therefore, have been in place to manufacture the Stylophone after its invention in 1967. It looks as though it may have done so for some years as the picture on the box shows a Melophone with the early Stylophone keyboard with the black non-playing sections; just as the Stylophone was updated with a new keyboard, so it seems was the Melophone.

The flap has a sticker on it showing the colour as yellow, which this one is; but other colours were presumably available.

It is, incidentally, not ‘Colour’, but ‘Color’, which may be an indication of the market it was intended for: Asia or America. There would be no reason why it should not be intended for the UK, as the legend ‘Made in Taiwan’ was commonly seen during that period – except that genuine, British-made Stylophones were available over here, and Dübreq would surely not want to allow or encourage competition.

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The similarities with the Stylophone – its appearance as well as its booklet – are striking: particularly the distinctively-shaped keyboard with its recess above to hold the stylus.

As can be seen in the above photograph, the size and method of connection to the stylus are also the same as the Stylophone, and a detailed comparison of the yellow Melophone stylus with a black Stylophone stylus, shows that their dimensions are more or less identical:

Nevertheless, there are significant differences – aside, of course, from its handsome ‘Grand Piano’ shape!

First of all, although apparently identical, the Melophone keyboard is longer. With a standard Stylophone on top, this can be clearly seen:

There are 2 extra notes at the bottom end of the keyboard, G and G#, and 1 extra note at the top, F – that is, 23 notes in total, as opposed to the Stylophone’s 20.

You can also see in the above photograph that the Melophone lacks the traditional Power and Vibrato switches at the left-hand end of the keyboard. Instead, the Power On/Off switch is incorporated into a volume control on the top of the Melophone, to the left:

The Vibrato switch is found on the left side, together with a control the standard Stylophone never had – an Octave-change switch!

Using this switch, the range of the Melophone can be extended by another 12 notes, giving the instrument an exceptionally wide range.

Turning the instrument over reveals the battery compartment – like the original Stylophone, the Melophone requires a 9v PP3 battery – and the three screws which need to be undone to access the inside.

The circuit board inside is quite different from the standard Stylophone – and so is the circuit itself: no fewer than 6 transistors can be identified in the following pictures (These are 1 x ED1402A, 3 x ED1402D, 1 x ED1402E and 1 x ED1602E, which are all NPN General Purpose transistors – except the 1602E, which is a PNP):

It has no tuning control like the standard Stylophone; I wonder if the top has been removed from one of the potentiometers in the first internal picture in order to make some pitch adjustment.

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Comparing the Melophone Booklet with a typical Stylophone booklet of the period, the close similarity is evident:

Even the two pieces of music at the back of the booklet are the same: ‘Silent Night’ in the key of Bb and ‘The Londonderry Air’ in the key of C, although references to ‘Stylophone’ or ‘Dübreq’ are noticeably absent.

Sufficiently Stylophone-like, I’m sure you’ll agree! The two low notes beneath the Stylophone’s normal lowest note don’t come out too well, though. I’ll have to see if something can be done about that.

Describing a Hong Kong made Stylophone, the Stylophone Collectors Information Site says ‘Problems were experienced by the Dübreq company regarding patent infringments, but licences were apparently also granted, so it is very difficult to categorise this particular model.’ Perhaps the same can be said for the Melophone: it definitely isn’t a Stylophone, but it seems to me reasonably built and with some very close similarities – was it somehow produced under licence, or just a clever copy? If anyone has any further information, please let me know.

The idea for the StyloSound came to me when, at about the same time, I acquired two small sound effect devices. One was a ‘Sound Machine’, a small hand-held unit with 16 push-buttons, the other was a Sound effect kit with PCB, also with 16 different sounds. I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two things into one unit and use the Stylophone stylus to trigger the sounds; plus I was also working on devices to interact with the ‘Bigfoot’ trigger/sequencer, so I decided to add the capability for the sounds to be triggered by the Bigfoot’s 4-bit binary output.

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There are several varieties of Sound Machine. The one I got was the silver ‘SciFi’ version. This has a number of interesting ‘spacey’ effects, some of which I recognised from Star Wars, Close Encounters and others; some I didn’t.

These Sound Machines aren’t all exactly the same inside, apparently (this site gives a very good first-hand account of looking inside them: http://www.magicmess.co.uk/cb/sm.php)*, but I guess the sounds are all initiated the same way – a +V pulse into the appropriate input of the dedicated chip which stores the samples.

Having opened the Sound Machine and taken the PCB out, it was easy to attach a wire to each of the 16 inputs. These wires went to the middle 16 notes on a Stylophone keyboard, salvaged from a broken instrument – via 16 SPDT switches, as I wanted to be able to choose either the sound from the Sound Machine or the sound from the Sound effect kit individually in each of the 16 positions. This picture shows how the switches were arranged on the front of the StyloSound:

The Stylophone stylus was connected to +V, and the output from the Sound Machine PCB went to the Stylophone speaker, which was much better than the small speaker in the original.

The Sound Machine is powered by three small 1.5v button cells, so it was no problem to use the Stylophone’s own battery compartment, which takes three AA batteries. With all the switches to the left, the Sound Machine PCB was selected, and it was possible to play all 16 sounds from the Stylophone keyboard. It was clearer from this than using the original buttons that each sound has to play right through before a new one can be selected.

The next obvious step was to interfere with the playback speed of the sample. This version of the Sound Machine has only four visible components, two resistors and two capacitors – all tiny SMD (surface-mount) type – with the main chip embedded in its plastic blob. Using the wetted finger method, I found the resistor responsible for playback speed, which is marked ‘R2’. I removed it and replaced it with a potentiometer, which slowed down and speeded up the playback.

In this photograph you can see the points at which wires are soldered to the Sound Machine PCB. In the magnified area you can just about make out the resistor on the left marked ‘R1’, the removed resistor, ‘R2’ (detached but still lying beside the place it was removed from), the wires going to the potentiometer and the two SMD capacitors behind the wires:

Unusually in my experience, the chip reacted badly to both too low a resistance and too high, and a 1M potentiometer, my usual first choice, was too big for it, causing it to crash. In the end, I settled on a 470K potentiometer with 100k trimmers either side. When the trimmers had been adjusted, this seemed to keep the resistance within acceptable levels.

(Later, I read the website referenced above, and the writer had a different solution to this problem, but I didn’t have time to check it out).

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The above is all you would need to do to bend a Sound Machine, but the next thing in my case was to unpack the Sound Effect kit, which contained the following components:

The two logic chips are a 4066 (quad analog SPST switch), and 4011, (quad 2-input NAND gate); the sound effect chip was on a separate board, inserted, strangely, at right angles to the main board in the slot on the right. The 4 SPDT switches enable the sound to be selected manually – the input is 4 bit binary – as an alternative to the 4 inputs on the left-hand side of the board. Output is through what looked like a small piezo element (the round black component in the bottom left of the picture).

The small board which the sound effect chip itself sits on is one of a range in the 9561 series. This one has the prefix ‘LX’, but there are others, such as ‘CK’, ‘CL’, ‘CW’, ‘KD” and others: all have the same general purpose, finding use in alarms, doorbells, and simple toys, making noises such as police sirens, machine guns and so on. Simple circuits such as this one can be found on the internet utilising very few external components to produce the required sound (generally only one or two in each application):

In fact, the kit I bought in an eBay auction only cost about the same as the module itself, and took full advantage of the range of sounds available by using the two switching terminals (F1 and F2) and a more complex array of resistors in place of the single 200k resistor shown in the circuit above. The full list of sounds available is as follows:

Some of these interpretations are rather fanciful, but that was no problem as I was more interested in making noise than repeating recognisable sounds.

This chart – for a similar chip in the series – gives some idea of the variations in binary inputs, combinations of selection inputs and resistances that produce different sounds. If you read Chinese, which I don’t, it probably tells you in the right-hand column what sounds these combinations make.

The PCB was robustly constructed and I put it together omitting the four slide switches, as I intended to control it externally, and didn’t attach the piezo sounder, which wasn’t going to be used.

Several of the resistors, when tested, had an effect on the pitch and speed of the sounds – the main job of the 4066 and 4011 is to select different combinations of resistors to affect the sound produced, much as indicated in the chart above – so I picked the likeliest one and replaced it with a 1M potentiometer. This seemed to do the trick – perhaps taking things slightly too far in the upper direction, so I added a preset in series to keep it from going to its maximum – although it had happily done this without any danger of crashing the chip.

I only had a log potentiometer available, and in the end this was quite fortunate. I found that connecting it the opposite way round from what would be expected – i.e. turning it clockwise decreased the pitch and speed, rather than increasing it – exploited the logarithmic scale well, making a much slower and smoother transition through the higher pitches and speeds. I could have bought an ‘anti-log’ pot, but additional time and expense didn’t seem worth it.

This was a timely reminder that a useful part of experimentation would be to compare lin and log pots in particular situations, and reversing the log ones to see what difference this produced. (Reversing the linear ones would, of course, do no good, as they progress evenly through the scale from top to bottom, whichever way round they are).

This part of the circuit (the kit PCB) now looked like this:

The original circuit diagram was provided by the supplier, Chip_Partner_Store, a Chinese company with an eBay shop at http://stores.ebay.com/Chip-Partner-Store. Places like this – and there are many of them on eBay – are great for browsing through: you can find great deals on bulk buys of common components, as well as somewhat more unusual ones at very reasonable prices, and odd chips and modules like this one, which could always come in handy.

I’ve indicated in the diagram where I added the 1M potentiometer and preset, plus four LEDs, connected, via 470Ω resistors, to the A B C D inputs, the other ends connected to ground. These were not there for any reason, particularly, except as an indicator of the code being received – and on the principle established with Bigfoot that flashing lights are always good. I was sceptical as to whether the circuit supplying the four inputs would be able to power these as well as operate the Sound effect module correctly, but it all seemed OK.

The greyed-out section at the output wasn’t used in the final circuit.

Actually, this unit begins sounding repeatedly as soon as power is connected to it, since the default input 0 0 0 0 has an associated output – ‘Machine gun voice’ – and I couldn’t find a way of stopping it, so I also added a power on/off switch to this board, which isn’t shown, in case this feature became annoying.

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SInce the circuit has four binary inputs, and I wanted to control the unit with the Bigfoot, which has a 4-bit binary output, it would seem logical to connect the Bigfoot output directly to the A B C D inputs.

Unfortunately, this wouldn’t allow the Sound effect module to be operated by the Stylophone keyboard, or the Bigfoot to control the Sound Machine, so additional circuitry was needed to convert the binary input into 16 individual outputs, and then convert that back into binary . . .

. . . Fortunately, the first of those would be a duplicate of part of the Bigfoot circuitry, which I was familiar with, using a 4067 chip. This part of the circuit looked like this:

The input from the 5-pin DIN socket goes first to a 4050 hex buffer. Four of the six buffers are used. The reason for doing this is to exploit an unusual and very useful feature which the 4050 shares with its more common sibling, the 4049.

Both perform a similar function, but the 4049 inverts the input (high level voltage in = low level voltage out, low level voltage in = high level voltage out), and the 4050 doesn’t.

What both of them are able to do is accept an input voltage level higher than the supply voltage, a vital consideration here as the output from Bigfoot is at 9v, whereas the circuitry of the StyloSound is at only 4.5v. The 4050 is able to acccept the 9v input from Bigfoot and safely reduce it to 4.5v for the other circuits. 9v isn’t a problem for CMOS chips, but the Sound Machine and the Sound effects module are both rated at 4.5 – maybe 5 or 6 maximum – volts.

The four outputs of the 4050 go into the A B C D inputs of the 4067. Each of the 16 outputs of the 4067 goes to the pole of one of the SPDT switches described earlier. According to the binary coding on the inputs, one of the 16 outputs of the 4067 is connected to +V, and this signal is sent in the direction either of the Sound Machine when the switch is to the left, or the Sound effect module when it’s to the right.

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The Sound Machine has 16 separate inputs, so no further circuitry was required: each switch was connected to one of the 16 places on the Sound Machine PCB where there used to be buttons.

For this signal to operate the Sound effect module, however, it needed to be changed back into binary.

Fortunately, this change is not difficult to implement, using a pair of 4532 chips and a 4071. The 4532 is essentially the opposite of the 4067: it takes individual inputs and converts them to binary. Each one has only 8 individual inputs and outputs in 3-bit binary, but the datasheet showed this 16-input, 4-bit binary output circuit, which is the one I used:

The 16 inputs marked ‘From Stylophone Keyboard’ were all connected to ground with 100k resistors so that each one would be at 0v if not receiving a +V signal from the keyboard or the 4067. The outputs of the 4071 were connected to the Sound effects module where marked A B C D in the earlier diagram.

Here’s how the physical connections are made, and what the chips look like on the board:

I’m not entirely sure that the correct order of those 16 inputs is as implied in the datasheet circuit. Since I had LEDs on the inputs of the Sound effects module – i.e. effectively at the outputs of the 4071, I was able to check the sequence, and I found myself swapping some of them around. If you’re using this method of converting single outputs to binary, it would be advisable to check this as you go along. In my case, the wiring to and from the SPST switches was such a bird’s nest, that it became too difficult to work this out. If it becomes clearer when I use this system in future projects, I’ll make sure to record the correct sequence.

However, when tested with ‘Bigfoot’, the module was triggered accurately, and the LEDs on the input lit up with the correct numbers when the notes were tested with the stylus and keyboard.

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So now I had two separate sound effect circuits which differed in several ways: the Sound Machine uses samples, which are played back in their entirety, and are particularly effective when slowed down; the Sound effects module produces electronic sounds from oscillators, which can be cut off and replaced at any time by another sound, and lend themselves to being sped up.

Both sections had separate pitch/speed controls; both could be controlled automatically by Bigfoot, or manually via the Stylophone keyboard.

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I could have stopped there, but I had another idea which I thought could be included. I believe this is known in the trade as ‘feature creep’ – just adding that one extra implementation, which then turns into two, then three . . . and eventually makes a simple circuit over-complicated.

But I had just acquired a number of unwanted ‘Voice Recorder’ key rings – 100, in fact! – at a few pence each. At this price, they weren’t guaranteed to work, but when I tested some, quite a few seemed OK, and they were powered by 3 little coin cells – i.e. 4.5v, the same as the rest of the circuits in the StyloSound, so I thought I could employ a couple of them here.

Here’s what they look like:

There’s a very small microphone, a Record/Play switch, a button to operate whichever of the two functions it’s switched to, and an LED to indicate that it’s recording, as opposed to playing back. I thought it would be good to be able to record a small (up to 8.2 seconds, it said) burst of sound while the samples or effects were being manipulated, then be able to play it back precisely the same again, a primitive – but undeniably inexpensive – repeat/looping device.

So I added a couple of these, connected to the outputs of the Sound Machine and the Sound effect module. Small tactile switches glued to the front of the instrument replaced the ‘Record/Play’ switch and button, and I also moved the small LED’s to the front panel as well.

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Only one thing remained, as far as the circuit was concerned, which was the output stage. This turned out to be . . . strange.

First of all, I needed to mix together the four outputs: the Sound Machine, the Sound Effects module and the two recording devices, as well as send the Sound Machine and Sound Effects module outputs to the inputs of the recorders. I planned to do this with a passive mixer – i.e. just join the outputs together with resistors.

The Sound Machine worked perfectly with the internal speaker, but the Sound Effects module would only work with the other speaker terminal connected to +V rather than 0v: otherwise, it was extremely quiet. I got round this by taking the output directly from the output of the LX9561 board, as indicated in the circuit diagram above, and bypassing the output transistor.

The outputs of the recorders were much too quiet, too, and the only way I could make them loud enough was to give them a path to +V by means of a very low value resistor (22Ω). The sound quality of these didn’t quite match that of the Sound Machine and Effects module – partly, no doubt, because of reduced bandwidth in the recorders – but they definitely added a useful function.

In fact, I had intended to add tone and volume controls at this point, but the device refused point-blank to make any sound if anything other than a very low value resistor was put in the output path, I don’t know why.

In the end, I used 22Ω resistors to join the 4 outputs (two in series for the Sound Machine, which was a little louder than the others) and ran this straight to the speaker and output socket. So, the final stage looked like this:

The resistors are all 22Ω, as opposed to some other equally low value, simply because I had a pile of them which were going spare.

So: strange, but when I plugged it into my mixer, it sounded fine, and the volume could be adjusted there.

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The only thing left to do was to finish the case. There was so much internal wiring and circuitry that the case had to be made 2.5″ deeper. I constructed sides from an offcut piece of white plastic and superglued them in place – not especially neatly, it has to be said – with a little internal bracing.

The Taurus wasn’t a major project, but a handy companion piece to the Gemini, an earlier Stylophone modification.

The problem with the Gemini is that it has two voices, output in stereo, but, typical of the Stylophone, it has only the one speaker. This means that some of its effects are only available via the stereo line out.

As a result of much past experimentation, I have many Stylophone bits left over. To make the Taurus, which was to be a very simple external amplifier, I used an empty case, some spare grille material, two amplifier circuit boards and two speakers, all from S1 reissue versions of the instrument.

The Stylophone grille isn’t glued down, and can be removed from the inside by pushing out half a dozen lugs which hold it in place. I did this first, cut a hole in the top of the case for the second speaker – vaguely matching the hole through which the original sounds – and refixed the grille.

The picture shows the second speaker glued in place, and the two amplifier boards connected to a new stereo input socket, the battery box and the speakers:

I wasn’t using any of the original keyboard, switch and socket parts, so I glued some spare grille sections inside the switch and socket holes and outside over the hole through which the keyboard is normally accessed.

A small tripod was attached to the base to enable the speakers to be angled for better distribution of the sound. Decoration consisted of astrological symbols, in the style of the Gemini, and matching black and white bulls, front and back.

It works well with the Gemini, which has its own volume and mix controls, but is a very basic unit indeed – no volume control, no on/off switch and no external power socket: it uses three AA batteries like the Gemini itself, and could be useful with other instruments needing a slight volume boost and not connected via a line out socket.

[Edit: the Taurus now has a volume control, which I should have put into start with. This makes it much more practical to use.

As it uses a pair of Stylophone amp boards, I’ve done exactly the same as the Stylophone, and put a 10k log potentiometer at the input – in this case a dual, one for each channel].

After opening my 350S and giving it a good clean, I decided to carry out a few simple mods before putting it back together again.

The first thing I did was to detach the external connections to the two circuit boards to make it easier to take everything apart and get at. These connections were:

keyboard

speaker

power

styluses

pitch

I carefully desoldered the wires, and replaced them with 2 or 3-way Molex connectors, like these:

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At this stage I decided not to make any further modifications to the keyboard. The keyboard PCB now plugs into the main circuit board and is much easier to remove for cleaning and for further potential modifications.

This picture shows the front and back of the keyboard PCB with a 2-way Molex socket fitted, connecting top and bottom of the chain of resistors which produce the different notes:

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In the case of the speaker wires, the Molex connector makes it easier to move the main circuit board around while working on it, as the wires are no longer than absolutely necessary and the speaker is firmly fixed to the top half of the Stylophone body.

The modification I made to this – which I’ve done with several of my instruments recently – was to add a switch to swap between the internal speaker and a larger external speaker (as described here). I chose a large DPDT rocker switch, which seemed to be in keeping with the 350S’s style. I don’t know how necessary it was, but as the internal speaker is 35Ω and the external speaker is 8Ω , I added a 3W 27Ω resistor in series with the output, which is a pair of 4mm banana plug sockets.

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As far as power was concerned, I first wanted to replace the large PP9 batteries. Not only are these heavy and expensive, but they take up a lot of room inside the Stylophone case, which might be needed to house extra circuitry. So what I decided to do at this stage was to replace them with something more practical: rechargeable PP3’s.

I wasn’t sure these would be powerful enough to allow the 350S to function properly, but I exchanged the PP9 wiring for PP3-sized battery clips and everything seemed to be working. I then looked for some PP3 holders that would provide a more permanent fixture for the batteries. This type seemed to fit the bill:

There was just enough room to fit these side by side into one of the covers formerly used for access to the PP9’s, each one attached with 4 small nuts and bolts. Although opened from the outside, these battery holders occupy the internal space originally taken up by one of the PP9’s.

Clips for the two PP3’s are connected to the power Molex connector via a 3.5mm mono socket with an integral switch, so that anything plugged into the socket automatically disconnects the internal batteries.

Later, the socket might be used for an 18v power supply, but for the time being I attached the discarded PP9 wiring and clips to a 3.5mm plug, so that PP9’s can still be used, but don’t have to be installed inside the body of the 350S.

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Unlike the regular Stylophone, the 350S has two styluses: one for normal playing, sounding continuously for as long as the stylus is in contact with the keyboard; and one for ‘Reiteration’ mode – with the appropriate switch selected – producing a fast or slow series of pulses, in imitation of a banjo or mandolin, on which it’s common to pluck a single note repeatedly.

However, I had found while modifying normal stylophones, that it was sometimes handy to have two styluses, one in each hand, for playing quicker or more intricate passages; so I decided to rewire the two existing styluses as standard, and add two extra ones for Reiteration mode.

With the Molex connectors in place, it was easy to wire all four styluses up, but not so easy to find a way to secure the extra two to the Stylophone in such a way that they would be easy to reach. In the end, I used a pair of clips like this, sold on eBay as penholders and meant, I think, to clip onto a pocket:

I had some spare white styluses, so the ‘normal’ styluses are black, and the ‘reiteration’ styluses are white. I attached a holder each side of the Stylophone in which the white styluses sit. The long wires attached to these can be pushed inside the body of the Stylophone when not in use.

I wasn’t able to find an exact match for the wire used by Dübreq for attaching the styluses. It’s only just over 2mm in diameter, and very flexible; there are no more than 10 or 11 strands of wire inside quite a thick outer layer, and a non-conductive cord running along the length of it, on the inside – presumably for strengthening. If I ever find out where to get it, I’ll add it as an Edit to this post: in the meantime I had to make do with a standard multi-stranded white ‘hook-up’ wire of about the same width.

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Dealing with the pitch of the 350S didn’t involve detaching external wires, in fact, but I added a 3-way Molex connector to the tuning control to make it easier to experiment with.

Unlike some of my previous Stylophone mods, I wasn’t looking for extreme pitch changes this time, but something more along the lines of a synth modulation wheel. Strangely, these seem to be very rare, but I found one produced by the German company Doepfer, described here. It comes as a kit of parts, like this:

The pot supplied with it is a 10k, which has a knurled shaft fitting tightly inside the hole in the ‘half-wheel’.

I wired the wheel in parallel with the existing tuning control, and its effectiveness depended on three things:

1. The setting of the tuning control: the higher it was set, the less variation produced by the wheel. Not much I could do about this, as the tuning control is used to set the 350S to the correct pitch, compared to other instruments. If it proves a problem, it could perhaps be solved in the future by a slight adjustment to the keyboard resistor chain.

2. The value of the pot. I found that a 2.5k pot was the most effective, but couldn’t find one with a shaft compatible with the Doepfer wheel. So I added some 10k resistors in parallel with the 10k pot. Originally I added 3, which would have made the pot 2.5k, but 2 seemed to be enough (3.3k), and took up less space, so I left it at that.

3. The part of the potentiometer track covered by movement of the wheel. The wheel wasn’t able to move the wiper of the potentiometer round the whole track – which is normal for mod wheels, joysticks, etc. It took a bit of experimentation to find the right place, which essentially meant turning the potentiometer to exactly the right position before attaching the wheel. It needed to be at zero when the wheel was deflected fully down, and eventually I found the right place, wired leads and a Molex plug to it and fixed it in place with small nuts and bolts.

The whole construction took the place previously occupied by the left-hand PP9, with the wheel appearing through a slot in the top of the 350S . The Doepfer kit cost about £10, so it was a bit of an extravagance, and something like it could probably be rigged up more cheaply. However, it adds an interesting feature to the 350S which it never had before.

This picture shows the pitch wheel assembly in place and also, in the background, the speaker switch and banana sockets.

This picture shows the top half of the 350S body, with the new components and the Molex connectors in place, with the circuit boards removed:

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After fitting everything, it was time to put the 350S back together.

The first item to go back into place was the main PCB. This picture shows the board in position, with the 6 fixing screws marked:

Next, the Keyboard PCB was installed. The 4 fixing screws are marked:

Before the bottom half of the 350S body was attached, the PP3 battery clips were fed into the battery holders:

The two halves of the body were fitted together and batteries inserted:

Finished and ready to go! The underside of the 350S now looks like this:

and the front and back like this:

This gives a good view of the power socket on the back left, as you look at it; the speaker switch and sockets on the back right; the pitch wheel on the top on the right; and the white ‘reiteration’ styluses in their holders.

*

Finally, with the 350S back together and in operation, I looked at the suggested external addition, a volume pedal. According to the 350S manual, this would replace the photo control, and adjust not only the volume, but also the waa filter and the vibrato depth.

The manual recommends a ‘standard Foot Pedal’: but what was a standard foot pedal in the 1970s is not what we might consider a standard foot pedal – or ‘expression’ pedal – these days. What’s required here is a 50k-100k log pot, which plugs into the 350S via a 6.35mm (1/4″) mono jack plug.

I had an old volume pedal (probably dating almost from that era!) which I was able to adapt. The original cable was crackly and the pot was scratchy, so I shortened the cable to remove the section that was obviously damaged inside, and replaced the pot.

I didn’t have a 47k or 50k to experiment with, so I used a 100k, but that seemed to be fine. The only oddity is that the ‘waa’ works backwards, in that the filter is at the ‘high end’ with the heel down – as compared to, for example, a guitar wah pedal, where heel-down is the low end, and toe-down is the high end. I tried putting a polarity change switch in the pedal, but that didn’t work, as the pedal mechanism – just the same as the pitch wheel described earlier – is set to reach its minimum when the heel is fully down, and doesn’t cover the full travel of the pot, so when the two ends of the pot were swapped, the pedal wasn’t reaching zero, which it needed to do to produce the full ‘waa’ effect. I’ll just have to get used to it.

After playing the instrument for a while, I noticed that one of the switches was a bit crackly, so this is something I might tackle later on, together with a couple more mods I have in mind.

As described in Bigfoot, Part 1, I was constructing a device to play a modified stylophone remotely and automatically. Using a 16 way analogue switch, the 24-pin 4067 chip, I designed a device where any one of 15 intervals on a 2-octave tonic sol-fa scale would be triggered by changing the chip’s 4-bit binary input.

First of all, I had used a physical control, a 16 position binary or hexadecimal rotary controller; what I needed next to find was chips that could be made to output sequences of 4-bit binary numbers.

There are several of these, and I went for the 4516, which is a pre-settable binary counter. It can, if left alone, repeatedly count upwards from 0 – 15, outputting numbers in binary form (‘0 0 0 0’ to ‘1 1 1 1’) on the pins marked ‘Q1’ to ‘Q4’ in the diagram below at the speed of a pulse connected to its clock input (Pin 15); or downwards from 15 – 0. But by pre-setting a certain number, in binary form, on 4 extra binary inputs, marked ‘P1’ – ‘P4’ in the diagram, it can also be made to count upwards from this number to 15; or downwards from this number to 0.

This is how the 4516 is usually represented in circuits:

Q1 – Q4, as mentioned above, are the outputs, and P1 – P4 are the inputs for the number the count starts from, both in the form of a binary number. The ‘Preset Enable’, pin 1, is usually held low (0v): when it’s taken high (+v) the number on the inputs P1 – P4 is loaded in and the next count starts from that number. ‘Preset Enable’ is sometimes referred to as ‘Load’ for this reason. The ‘Carry Out’ is normally high, but goes low when the count ends.

The ability to count downwards from a set number would be useful for an arpeggiator, which could be set to repeat a sequence with a length of 2 – 16 notes, using the rotary encoder, described in Part 1, connected to the 4 binary inputs to preset the sequence length.

The circuit for this device was extremely simple, requiring only the rotary encoder, a momentary switch to tell the 4516 to load the sequence length number, an on/off switch and two inverters from a 40106 (which has 6 in it altogether) . One of the inverters was connected as an oscillator, which was connected to the 4516’s Clock input: this determines the speed at which notes sound; the other inverter was connected between the ‘Carry Out’ and ‘Preset Enable’ pins: the ‘Carry Out’ is normally high, so the inverter keeps the ‘Preset Enable’ low; when the count ends the ‘Carry Out’ goes low and the inverter sends a ‘high’ pulse to the Preset Enable, reloading the start number.

Pin 10 is connected to 0v in this circuit, which tells the 4516 to count down, not up: this was the easiest way to make sure it counted the right number of notes in the sequence.

In fact, counting up or down would result only in a scale or part of a scale being played, so I made the output a bit more interesting by reversing the 4 outputs. Instead of connecting the A output of the 4516 to the A input of the 4067, the B output to the B input, etc., I connected it so that A B C D were connected D C B A. In essence this meant that consecutive notes in the sequence would not be consecutive notes in the scale, which I thought would be more interesting.

This produced method 2 of controlling the Stylophone: automatic arpeggiation.

*

The third method of controlling the Stylophone automatically used 3 more of the inverters in the 40106 which had been used for the 4516 clock and ‘Carry Out’ inverter. The inverters were wired as oscillators.

This was the idea that came from the ‘Slacker Melody Generator’, described at http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27239&postorder=asc&start=50. Each of the 4 oscillators is connected to one of the 4 inputs of the 4067; each runs at a different speed, changing the value on that input from low to high, or 0 to 1. The different successive combinations of 0s and 1s produces a random melody, which can be changed by adjusting the speed of the oscillators, increasing or decreasing the rate at which each particular input changes from ‘1’ to ‘0’.

The reason the four oscillators have two capacitors each is simply because the original circuit I used suggested values of 220n; I soldered these in place, but the oscillators seemed to run too fast for my liking, and it was easier to add new ones in parallel than take the old ones out and replace them. The result of putting capacitors in parallel is the opposite of putting resistors in parallel – instead of the overall value decreasing, it increases; the capacitance is larger and the oscillators run slower.

Having put the 4067 and the five DPDT switches in place, I then had to connect the relevant input/outputs to 24 different resistors, in a chain (or ladder) like the original one inside the stylophone. I suppose it would have been possible to calculate the exact resistances, but I had some time ago obtained a hundred 10k presets for about 7p each, for exactly this kind of situation, so decided to use those and tune it by ear.

This took some time, but at the end of it I had a substitute resistor chain for the SoftPot Stylophone and some methods of controlling it automatically.

*

It then occurred to me that with this arrangement, all this extravagance could only control one stylophone at a time, so I had a think about how to connect more instruments (and possibly instruments other than stylophones!).

The way to do it, it seemed to me, was to use the binary inputs to the 4067 as an output: any device could then be controlled, just by installing the 4067 and the five ‘major/minor’ switches in it – or perhaps some other suitable arrangement.

So I added two 5-pin DIN sockets as outputs, the five terminals being A, B, C, D and 0v. Each of the four A, B, C, D outputs was buffered, using four of the six buffers in a 4050. The 4050 is similar to its sister chip, the more well-known 4049; but whereas the 4049 inverts its outputs, the 4050 doesn’t. This chip has even cleverer properties, which I will be using in a later project, but here I used it to ensure the binary outputs were of sufficient strength to make their way through a connecting cable and satisfactorily operate external circuitry.

I also added at this stage Clock In and Clock Out sockets, which would enable Bigfoot to set the tempo of a piece involving different instruments, or follow the tempo set elsewhere. These two input/outputs passed through the remaining two buffers on the 4050.

The final thing was to add two more 5-pin DIN sockets, this time as inputs. This would enable external circuitry to control the 4067s. I had several more ideas of suitable external devices which could be used to do this, and I hope to be able to get around to making these quite soon.

The only other unusual component needed to get all this to work was a suitable master switch, to select the various external and internal inputs to the 4067s. This had to have 4 poles – the A, B, C, D binary inputs – and 5 positions. 4 pole, 3 way rotary switches are easy to come by, but 4 pole, 4 or 5 way are not. Fortunately, I was able to source a 4 pole, 5 way switch on eBay from a supplier in Hong Kong for just a couple of quid, so everything was in place.

With a circuit like this – just a handful of chips and a few external components – you either get a neatly laid out PCB or a rats’ nest of wiring. I ended up with a rats’ nest of wiring . . . however, it worked, even when crammed into the case, with the addition of an extra section underneath the ‘big foot’ I had selected.

This picture shows the two binary input sockets on the left. The 5 way switch is the knob on the front of the Bigfoot, just the right of centre in this picture.

Due to a certain amount of experimentation along the way, some changes of mind about the functions, and some difficulties in getting all the switches and sockets to fit, there were some extraneous holes which I had drilled in the case. The plastic frogs are there to hide the holes. I also added a square of velcro on the back where I could attach a battery holder, as I had done with a number of previous projects.

*

This is what Bigfoot sounds like, controlling the SoftPot Stylophone and the StyloSound at the same time:

[Edit: there is now a link to a short video of the Bigfoot in action at the bottom of this page].

I’d made enough instruments for the time being, and it was time to construct some automatic controllers – sequencers, arpeggiators and the like – as an alternative to playing them by hand.

When I made the SoftPot Stylophone, I had added a socket which allowed external circuitry to replace the chain of resistors which govern the pitch of the instrument. This project was to make a device which would be able to use this feature to operate the SoftPot Stylophone remotely, and this rather blurry photograph shows the result – Bigfoot:

The main chip used in the circuits described above is a 4051, which is basically a single-pole 8-way switch. It’s usually depicted in circuits like this:

The way it works is like this: it’s an analogue switch, not a digital switch, meaning you can connect anything you like to the pole (pin 3, marked Z in the diagram) and the 8 switch input/outputs (on the right-hand side, marked Y0 – Y7). It doesn’t have to be logic high or logic low (i.e. +v or 0v) , it can be any voltage, an audio signal, anything – just like a physical switch. Any one of the 8 input/outputs can be connected – one at a time – to the pole, not by turning a physical switch, but by the logic high or logic low status of the 3 ‘Select’ inputs (pins 9, 10 and 11, marked S1 – S3).

You can have every combination of logic high and logic low on the three Select inputs, ranging from 0v on all of them, 0v on one of the three and +v on two of them, +v on two of them and 0v on one, or +v on all of them. There are eight possible variations, starting with 0v on all of them, which you could represent as ‘0 0 0’ or the binary equivalent of the number zero, to +v on all them, which could be represented as ‘1 1 1’ or the binary equivalent of the number 7.

If you feed 0v to all three of the Select inputs, or ‘0 0 0’, this is lowest possible binary number, so the lowest or first input/output is connected to the pole (Y0, pin 13); if you connect, say the one on pin 9 (S3) to +v and the other two to 0v, this would be the binary number ‘1 0 0’, the equivalent of the number 4. Because the sequence starts with ‘0 0 0’ , or zero, feeding in ‘1 0 0’ connects the 5th rather than 4th input/output to the pole (Y4, pin 1). By connecting all the Select inputs to +v, or ‘1 1 1’ (the number 7), the 8th input/output is connected to the pole (Y7, pin 4).

In the circuits I looked at, a common type of connection would be to have the pole connected to the part of an oscillator circuit that determines the pitch, and 8 input/outputs connected to different value resistors. This would mean that a different resistance would be connected to the oscillator and a different pitch would be sounded when each of the 8 input/outputs was connected to the pole.

You could determine whether each of the Select inputs was a ‘1’ or a ‘0’ with three 2 way switches, +v one way, 0v the other way, and change the notes by moving different switches up and down. But this would be rather tedious. By adding a circuit that automatically changed the ‘1’s and ‘0’s, you have a melody generator, arpeggiator or sequencer.

This was the kind of circuit I was after.

However, 8 notes was bit restricted. Not restricted because there are 12 notes in one octave, though: I reasoned that you could make life easier for yourself by only allowing notes in a single scale – the ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ approach so succinctly captured in the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from The Sound of Music (‘Do a deer, a female deer/Re, a drop of golden sun’, etc.). There are only 8 notes in a ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ scale, including the next ‘do’ up from the one you started from. If you just use those, you’ll never get an ‘out of tune’ note in your arpeggio or sequence.

The proper name for the ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ system, by the way, is ‘tonic sol-fa’, and was invented here in East Anglia by Sarah Ann Glover of Norwich, who lived from 1785 to 1867. This 1868 woodcut shows Sarah Ann teaching ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ to the musical children of Norfolk:

(Why this public domain picture is held by Music Department of the Bibliothèque National de France is not adequately explained by the Wikipedia, where I found it. I suppose the fame of ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ is international).

No, it was restricted instead because the SoftPot Stylophone has 12 ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ steps from the bottom of the keyboard to the top – and in any case could be made to produce notes outside the range of the built-in keyboard.

So I decided I needed 16 steps (2 octaves, including ‘do’ two octaves up from the start), and found a chip, the 4067, to do the job. The 4067 is a single-pole switch like the 4051, but with 16 switches instead of 8. The only way it differs in operation from the 4051 is that it requires 4 Select inputs in order to go all the way from ‘0 0 0 0’ (zero, meaning the first input/output is connected) to ‘1 1 1 1’ (15, meaning the 16th input/output is connected).

I also decided to make things slightly more complicated by considering alternative scales. If you follow the ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’ scale of the Rogers and Hammerstein song, this is a major scale. If, on the other hand, you wanted to play, for example, a minor scale, you would find that ‘mi’, sometimes ‘la’ and sometimes ‘ti’ have to be changed to be a semitone lower. And occasionally you might feel like making ‘re’ and ‘so’ lower as well. (‘Do’ and ‘fa’ can be left alone!).

I’ll explain in a minute exactly what scales I had in mind when doing this, and where I got the idea from, but adding the ability to sharpen or flatten certain notes of the scale meant that I needed 25 notes instead of 15, so the 4067 was wired up like this:

The notes depicted are the notes that would be used in the key of A. Since the SoftPot Stylophone has a tuning control (in fact two tuning controls!) on it, it can be made to play in any key, not just A; the circuit here doesn’t need to be changed, only the tuning on the SoftPot Stylophone itself.

Each of the 16 outputs of the 4067 is connected to a resistor in a chain. The top of the chain is connected to the tip of a 3 way (‘stereo’) 3.5mm socket; the bottom of the chain is connected to the ring, and the sleeve is connected to pin 1 of the 4067 – the pole of the 16-way switch. When plugged in, it takes the place of the Stylophone’s own resistor chain.

Note that switches allow you to choose between 1) major and minor 2nd (‘re’); 2) major and minor 3rd (‘mi’); 3) major and minor 5th (‘so’); 4) major and minor 6th (‘la’); and 5) major and minor 7th (‘ti’), as you see fit. C1/C#1 and C2/C#2, D#1/E1 and D#2/E2 etc. use the same switch, so there are 5 of these switches, not 10.

The reason I chose to do it this way is because of an extremely interesting article – series of articles, actually – which I read on The Tonal Centre website, written by Andrew Milne. I’m not in the slightest bit concerned that the theory described there is ‘unconventional and some of the concepts . . . quite novel’, as it seems to me to make perfect sense, and presents a coherent view of scales and chords which I’ve found quite easy to understand, and useful to use. Furthermore, Milne’s motives for writing the articles are ones with which I would hope none of my readers could disagree: ‘not for theory to be an intellectual straight-jacket which smothers spontaneity, but as a springboard for creativity and, even more importantly, as a foundation for exploration’.

Essentially, the articles do precisely as the author says in his introduction: ‘convince you that there is a lot more for the tonal composer to experiment with . . . than just the major and the minor scale.’

I can’t explain everything in the articles because a) there is too much, and b) I don’t understand it all; but essentially, the points I want to draw attention to are these:

1. What constitutes a useful and versatile scale?

A scale should constitute ‘a unified collection of notes – a selection which is in some sense complete and to which any addition is heard to be extraneous’.

2. What makes a scale useful as a melodic resource?

A scale should be ‘reasonably smooth and even, without sudden gaps which sound as if a note has been omitted, or sudden concentrations of notes which sound as if an extraneous note has been added’.

3. What makes a scale useful as a harmonic resource?

Because three-note major and minor chords are the basis of our kind of western music (like C-E-G and C-Eb-G), a scale shouldn’t have any notes which aren’t part of a three-note major or minor chord.

Of all possible scales there are only five prime scales which satisfy Milne’s criteria, as above. (These are the main criteria, but see the full article for a couple of others).

All of these scales contain, as it happens, seven notes, and these are clearly the most useful and versatile scales to use. This was good news for me, as the Bigfoot would inevitably use 7-note scales.

There are 8 different scales altogether in Milne’s system, not just 5, because of differences between major and minor, and so on, and these 8 variations of the 5 ‘prime scales’ (in the key of C) are:

1. The diatonic scale, major and ‘aeolian’:

C-D-E-F-G-A-B

C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb

2. The harmonic minor scale:

C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-B

3. The harmonic major scale:

C-D-E-F-G-Ab-B

4. The melodic scale, major and minor:

C-D-E-F-G-Ab-Bb

C-D-Eb-F-G-A-B

5. The double harmonic scale, major and minor:

C-Db-E-F-G-Ab-B

C-D-Eb-F#-G-Ab-B

So, there are 8 different scales you can use, which all allow you to make interesting melodies and chords. Each one has its own ‘character’, and some are much more commonly used than others.

This series of articles seemed to me when I came across it to be an extremely good guide to useful scales, and could be a help to anyone: you could use the description above to work out what scale or scales you commonly use, and then try writing a composition or improvising a solo using a completely different one. There’s bound to be at least one you’ve never thought of using before!

Bigfoot allows the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th (D, E, G, A, B in the above examples) to be individually adjusted, so arpeggios and sequences in all – well, almost all! – of these scales are possible. The double harmonic minor isn’t possible because Bigfoot can’t produce F# and G at the same time; but 7 out of 8 isn’t bad!

So, 16 individual intervals are available from the Bigfoot, spread over two octaves; the tonic is repeated 3 times, at 3 octaves; the 4th is repeated twice, at two different octaves; the other 10 notes are switchable between a ‘normal’ or ‘flattened’ version, which is semitone lower.

Hang on, that’s only 15 intervals . . . Well, since all 16 Select input combinations from ‘0 0 0 0’ to ‘1 1 1 1’ could be used to produce notes, there might in some circumstances be no way of stopping the Stylophone from sounding; so what I did was to start with ‘0 0 0 1’ (the second output) and make that the lowest note, reserving ‘0 0 0 0’ (the first output) for a rest where no note would sound. I added a switch so that the first and second inputs could be connected together for those situations when this would be better.

I also added a START/STOP switch, which is what pin 15 of the 4067 does: if connected to +v it stops, and all the switches are disconnected, regardless of the state of the Select inputs; if pin 15 is connected to 0v the switches start to work. (The 4051 also has this feature).

In practice, I actually installed a second 4067, with the two 4067’s being connected only at the 4 Select inputs (pins 10, 11, 13 and 14). I wanted to have an LED indication of which switch was connected, and had to separate this function from the resistor chain that produced the notes.

So the pole pin of the second 4067 was connected to +9v via two 1k resistors [not one, as shown in the diagram], and each of the 16 outputs was connected to a green LED (matching the green case the circuit was built into).

In order to test the LEDs – and later to test the notes which were being produced – I needed some way of connecting exactly the right input/output to the pole of the switch, so I would know I was adjusting the right preset. This meant feeding exactly the right combination of +v (‘1’s) and 0v (‘0’s) to the Select inputs, to get exactly the right output.

(The above picture shows a typical rotary encoder made by Alpha Electronics. RS online sell a couple, but looking at the product details, I don’t think the connections of the ‘Code 033’ version they sell is right. There are lots of 2 bit encoders, and lots of encoders which are not binary or hex. They won’t work – it has to be 4 bit binary with 16 positions, starting with ‘0 0 0 0’ at position 1 and stepping through the binary numbers 1 – 15, ending up at ‘1 1 1 1’ at position 16. These are referred to as ‘hex’ because the hexadecimal system has 16 numbers in it [usually written as ‘0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F’ – a more user-friendly way of depicting ‘0 0 0 0’ to ‘1 1 1 1’]).

I needed to use the encoder for another part of the circuit, which I’ll come to later, but for the time being its 4 outputs were connected directly to the 4 Select inputs, ‘A B C D’, of the 4067s. Its other connection, ‘Common’, was connected to + volts. To test it, I used 4 LEDs, and could see that turning it from position 1 to position 16, it automatically output the binary numbers in order from ‘0 0 0 0’ to ‘1 1 1 1’.

It’s worth mentioning an important point, to avoid later confusion, which is that ‘D’ is actually the bit on the left in a binary number such as ‘1 1 0 0’, and ‘A’ is the bit on the right. You might sometimes see ‘D’ referred to as the ‘Most Significant Bit’ (or ‘MSB’) and ‘A’ as the ‘Least Significant Bit’ (‘LSB’). That means the number sequence goes like this:

D C B A

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 1

0 0 1 0

0 0 1 1

0 1 0 0

etc.

The other thing about rotary encoders is that they don’t usually have a stop, they just go round and round. This is fairly useless if you need to know where ‘1’ is, or where ’16’ is, and this is the main reason why I decided to incorporate the LEDs as a visual indication. The other reason is that sequencers and so forth really ought to have flashing lights on them.

The rotary encoder is the knob on the right-hand side of the Bigfoot, just to the right of centre in this picture:

I glued the LEDs in place on the top and connected up the rotary switch. Sure enough, with each turn the LEDs lit up one by one, one at a time, and now it was possible to tell which was position 1, which was position 2, etc.

Not only that, with the lack of a stop at 1 and 16 – which you would expect with a normal rotary switch – if nothing else I had Method 1 of controlling the Stylophone remotely: a manual method of arpeggiation by spinning the encoder backwards and forwards! . . .

. . . Entertaining, but not the automatic method I was looking for, however, so I moved on to Part 2 of the construction.